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148 BRITISH BIRDS. 
ALUCO FLAMMEUS. 
BARN-OWL. 
(PLATE 7.) 
Strix aluco, Briss. Orn. i. p. 503 (1760); Linn. Syst. Nat. i. p. 182 (1766). 
Strix flammea, Linn. Syst. Nat. i. p. 153 (1766); et auctorum plurimorum— 
Temminck, Naumann, Gould, Macgillivray, Bonaparte, Sharpe, (Newton), &e. 
Aluco albus, Gerint, Orn. Meth, Dig. i. p. 89, pl. lxxxxii. (1767). 
Strix alba, Scop. Ann. I. Hist. Nat. p. 21 (1769). 
Aluco flammeus (Zinn.), Flem. Brit. An. p. 57 (1828). 
Strix guttata, Brehm, Vog. Deutsch. p. 106 (1831). 
Eustrinx flammea (Linn.), Webb & Berth. Orn. Canar. p. 8 (1841). 
Strix poensis, Fraser, P. Z. S. 1842, p. 189. 
Stridula flammea (Linn.), Sélys-Longch. Faune Belge, p. 60 (1842). 
Strix insularis, Pelz. Journ. Orn. 1872, p. 23. 
The Barn-Owl is a common resident throughout the British Islands, 
including the Hebrides, and appears only recently to have become extinct 
in the Orkneys. 
It is by no means the cosmopolitan bird that it has been represented to 
be. It is, in point of fact, a tropical bird, found throughout the equatorial 
region of both hemispheres, and not rangmg more than forty degrees north 
or south of the equator, except in Western Europe, where the influence of the 
Gulf-stream has produced a climate mild enough to allow of its wintering 
there. It is very rare in South Sweden, and is found nowhere else in the 
Scandinavian peninsula. It is rare. Western Russia, but is otherwise 
absent from Russia, Eastern Turkey, Greece, Asia Minor, Persia, Siberia, 
Mongolia, and China. There appear to be seven colonies of Barn-Owls. 
The first comprises Western Europe south of the Baltic, and Western Africa 
from Algiers to the Gold Coast, including the Azores, Madeiras, Canaries, 
and Cape-Verd Islands; the second South Africa and Madagascar ; the 
third the valley of the Nile and Palestine; the fourth the whole of India, 
extending to the north-west into Turkestan, and to the east into Burma; 
the fifth Java, Lombock, and Celebes; the sixth Eastern Australia and 
some of the Pacific Islands; the seventh North and South America from 
lat. 40° north to lat. 40° south, including the West Indies. In this latter 
colony alone Ridgway recognizes four subspecies. Barn-Owls from the 
other five colonies appear to be all subspecifically distinct from those of 
the first colony, though possibly not im every case from each other. In 
the West-European and West-African colony there are three forms—a 
pale eastern form, a dark western form, and a rufous southern form, with 
every possible intermediate form, and considerable irregularity in their dis- 
tribution, all three forms, for example, having been found in the British 
